The whole thing is just a pointless spaffing of negative energy.
Why bother with any arrangement at all if ultimately, any one of us is more likely to get a game for Villa than him?
The whole thing makes no sense. It was the only bit of positivity at the end of a shit window. But outside of a couple of appearances a very promising English born player, player of the tournament for the U21s has literally vanished into thin air. Othet than appearing in a Christmas sweater that is on the club website. Is he really so bewildered by the Unai system that he hasn't picked up anything at all in 3 months? No signs of a fall out, argument etc. Is this 10 game thing real that we simply won't play him at all?
Obviously. Based on what we've seen, there is one version of events that makes sense.
We have to spend £30m on him if he plays ten matches. He had come in to play* a role that is a combination of what McGinn / Rogers / Buendia do. From what the club has seen (and given a turbo-boost by what Buendia is doing) we now don't want to commit £30m on him playing that position, thinking that £30m is better used elsewhere. If Buendia had died on his arse in his first couple of appearances (or Elliott had been amazing), I'm guessing we'd have chucked our weight behind the signing. But he didn't, so we're rolling the dice on a couple of years of Buendia being what Elliott was supposed to be, and thinking where that money could be better used.
Elliott is clearly really good, and I'm sure he'd be quite comfortable with whatever Emery wants him to do. But not to the extent that we want to hand over the pre-agreed money for it.
*there's another role that he possibly played, the role of "this guy might make those twats that follow us less angry about how shit the season has started, so just agree to whatever gets this bloke over the line"
